Series S00666 - Matie Molinaro files

Matie Molinaro (née Armstrong) was a literary agent and the founder and president of the Canadian Speakers' and Writers Service, a literary agency and management company for writers, public speakers, and actors.

She was born on 24 March 1922 in Long Island, New York to William and Marion Armstrong. She graduated from Barnard College, Columbia University in 1943. During the Second World War, she served with the Red Cross and later with the Office of War Information in Algiers, Naples, Rome, and Trieste, as a war correspondent in the Psychological Warfare Branch. She met Julius Molinaro of Toronto in Rome and they subsequently married in Trieste.

After the war they settled in Toronto in the fall of 1946 with Julius returning to teach in the Italian Department at the University of Toronto. She became the book editor for the Italian-Canadian literary magazine Ecco. For a brief time she worked for McLelland & Stewart and subsequently she worked as an editor for Maclean's Magazine under the magazine's fiction editor, W. O. Mitchell. In 1950 she founded the Canadian Speakers' and Writers' Service. Since that time it has represented the interests of several leading Canadian authors, performers and speakers including Marshall McLuhan, Harry Boyle, Mavor Moore, Celia Franca, Peter Stersburg, Lister Sinclair, Don Harron, and several others. The Service also ran a writer's retreat north of Toronto until the late 1980s. Molinaro also acted as a ghost-writer, wrote publicity, and translated material in her career as president of CSWS.

In 1987, she was the co-editor, with Corinne McLuhan, of the book Letters of Marshall McLuhan (Toronto: Oxford University Press). Another area of interest was art history and for most of the 1980's she undertook a research project with her friend Barbara Brescia, on the subject of high renaissance and the old masters. This led to a published article, "The Randel Venus: A Lost Correggio" Italian Canadiana 3, no. 1 (spring 1987). It was later updated and published in the June 1992 issue of Apollo: The International Art Magazine.

Matie Molinaro died 10 May 2015 in Toronto.